Masturbation

They weren’t mine, and that was exactly what made them irresistible. I picked them up off the laundry-room floor knowing that night I would do everything with them I’d spent months imagining.

He let his hand slide down his abdomen in the darkness and allowed the scene to form: him in the middle of the couch, his wife on one side, her friend on the other, an impossible kiss.

He only wanted a decent shirt. But then she looked up from behind the counter, and Andrés’s mind began inventing what was never going to happen.

His mother had a habit of adjusting her thong as she walked, even when she knew I was watching. That afternoon, her empty bedroom proved too tempting to resist.

When he told me, “Take off your blouse in the parking lot,” I thought it was a joke. Ten minutes later, his wife was watching us from her bed on a video call.

I asked Damián to come with me and wait in the waiting room. The doctor invited him inside. I said nothing. That silence changed everything.

Half past three in the afternoon, no knickers, and a very clear plan in my head. What I didn’t account for was who would end up speaking to me through the door.

It started with private jokes and ended with screenshots neither of us should ever have shown the other. She liked girls; I liked her audacity.

There is one instant, just when the door closes and I hear the car driving away, when I stop being her husband and become something very different.

The toy was still on the nightstand, staring at me like a witness. And my body remembered everything she’d taught me just hours before.

I thought selling a few photos would be harmless. But that night, phone in hand, I discovered how badly I wanted someone who was only my friend.

I had forty minutes of class ahead of me, the camera on and the entire dildo inside me. I only had to keep my face still. That was all.

One random dawn I turned on the camera and, without knowing it, opened the door to the only woman who learned how to make me tremble from six hundred kilometers away.

I’ve got the face of a slut and everyone can tell. In the last carriage, pressed against bodies I don’t know, I let my hands do what my mind has already decided.

I bought black stockings with my heart in my throat, knowing that once I locked my apartment door I’d become the woman I’d been imagining all day.

He had been sleeping pressed against her back for a week to soothe the baby. A week of pretending not to notice what was happening between them in the dark.

She came downstairs with a smile that was no longer the same and one hand hidden behind her back. “Guess what I’ve brought,” she said. That night I understood what she was becoming.

It’s eleven, I’m alone again, and your last message is still glowing on the screen. I turn off the light, and then my mind —and my hands— decide for me.

A month went by without hearing from him. When he finally wrote, I knew that night I was going to give him something I’d never dared to give before.

The light stayed red, his latest photo stayed on my screen, and my hands had already stopped asking permission. I just had to get home. Or not.